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Article Title: How To Create Profits Using Viral Marketing
Techniques
Author: Jerry Bader
Word Count: 1830
Article URL: http://www.isnare.
Format: 64cpl
Author's Email Address: info[at]mrpwebmedia
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The Difference Among Viral, Buzz, and Word-of-Mouth
There are certain words, jargon that stands in for theory, that
starts with marketing industry insiders and before you know it
becomes the 'in' subject of books, blogs, articles, and MBA
dissertations. But as jargon filters down to the less
sophisticated, the meaning and ideas behind these words becomes
lost. Such is the case with the current state of thinking on
Buzz, Viral, and Word-of-Mouth marketing.
These terms are often used interchangeably but are they the
same thing? Dave Balter and John Butman in their book,
"Grapevine,' describe Buzz as a marketing tactic aimed at
generating publicity or awareness often without regard to any
specific message, while Viral marketing is a means of spreading
a marketing message through the use of contagious creative most
often Web-video and Word-of-Mouth is the process of product
story-telling. Balter's marketing agency concentrates on
creating word-of-mouth campaigns for his clients but the name
of his company is BzzAgent - no wonder the confusion.
Mark Huges, author of the book 'Buzz Marketing- Get People to
Talk About Your Stuff' points out that in order to create buzz
about your company or product you must develop a marketing
campaign that incorporates at least one, and preferable more,
of his Six Elements of Buzz:
1. Taboo,
2. Unusual,
3. Outrageous,
4. Hilarious,
5. Remarkable, and
6. Secret.
It would seem that these six elements are the same elements
that generate the contagious spread of information - Viral
marketing. In order for something to become viral, people must
talk about it, ergo word-of-mouth. But people can talk and
spread the word of a video or stunt without ever generating
much talk about the product. The famous, or infamous, Oprah
Winfrey-General Motors audience car give-away stunt is a prime
example of generating talk about a stunt without generating
much talk about the product. If as Balter suggest,
word-of-mouth is 'product story-telling,
definitely a difference between Buzz and Word-of-Mouth.
So if Buzz is the tactic for drawing attention to your company;
and Viral is the method of spreading the message; and
Word-of-Mouth is the result; we then have a clear distinction
between the three marketing terms.
The question is how can we construct a Web-based marketing
campaign that uses the Buzz tactic, Viral method, and
Word-of-Mouth message to produce the ultimate marketing
objective: more sales and profits; and are Huges' Six Elements
of Buzz the only media attributes that deliver a marketing
stir?
Solve The Marketing Mystery: Discover Means + Motive +
Opportunity
We've all watched enough 'Law and Orders' on television to know
that solving a mystery requires learning the means, motive and
opportunity of the puzzle. For today's marketers these elements
are clear.
Motive: to attract attention, breed interest, stimulate desire,
and generate action that ultimately produces increased sales and
profits.
Means: the advent of relatively low cost desktop digital video
tools and the creation of a new class of professional
multimedia Web-video producers brings affordable multimedia
creative to businesses that in the past could not afford
professional video content.
Opportunity: the penetration of high-speed Internet connections
plus the Web's ability to delivery multimedia audio and video
combined with the introduction of Web-video search databases by
dominant Internet players like Google and YouTube create the
necessary opportunity.
Why Web-Video Solves the Buzz-Viral-Word-
1. The 5 Strategic Goals of Marketing
2. The Anthropomorphizatio
3. Maslow's Extended Hierarchy of Needs
4. The 5 Elements of Communication
The 5 Strategic Goals of Marketing
Increased sales and profits is every company's prime motive,
however, in order to achieve those goals, certain intermediate
objectives must be met, especially as it concerns the Web that
by its nature is a sterile, remote environment. Marketing
campaigns should be constructed to provide the appropriate
audiences with five essential elements:
a. Awareness
b. Emotional Utility
c. Functional Utility
d. Process Facility
e. Confidence
Target audiences must be made aware of the company's existence
and must be made to comprehend its relevance to their needs;
and market audiences must be provided with a platform to
participate or get involved with the company.
A successful marketing campaign must tap into an audience's
need for emotional utility, a quality created in the audience's
collective consciousness from brand personality resulting from
corporate behavior and audience experience.
The campaign must also be able to speak to the functional
utility of the company's products or services. Hard information
and easily understood instructions must be made available so
that customers are actually able to generate the promised
benefits of the product or service.
The campaign must facilitate the process of moving potential
customers easily and conveniently from awareness, to utility,
to incentive, to sale. The process must be transparent and
mechanisms must be put in place to accommodate customers when
things go wrong.
The campaign must also create confidence in the organization'
ability to deliver the promised benefits both emotional and
functional.
The Anthropomorphizatio
More marketers are beginning to appreciate the effect of brand
personality on their relationships with customers and
prospects. It is apparent that markets have a clear idea as to
a brand's personality, whether a company pays attention to it
or not. And just as significantly, it is clear that companies
can't just change their television commercials or advertising
agency to overcome an unwanted or undesirable personality.
Brand personality is a function of audience experience:
everything from the way you respond to telephone inquiries, to
users ability to comprehend packaging instructions, to your
website and email inquiry response times. No amount of smiling
friendly faces in advertisements will make up for the
irritation of a multiple-transfer-
resolve a problem over the telephone.
Companies are ultimately separate entities whose personalities
are composed of a collective consumer consciousness created
through experience, interpreted from a very human perspective.
It is human nature to anthropomorphize non-human entities in
order to better deal with them. Batra, Lehman & Singh point out
in their 1993 paper that there are five significant human
personality traits.
The Big Five Human Personality Traits:
1. Extroversion/
2. Agreeableness,
3. Consciousness,
4. Emotional Stability, and
5. Culture.
Jennifer Aaker in her 'Journal of Marketing Research' article,
Dimensions of brand personality, relates the Big Five Human
Personality Traits to the Big Five Brand Personality Traits.
Big Five Brand Personality Traits:
1. Sincerity,
2. Excitement,
3. Competence,
4. Sophistication,
5. Ruggedness.
When companies build a website or implement any marketing
initiative there are consequences in the market collective;
managing those consequences is critical to not just developing
a brand personality but managing and fostering it to meet your
ultimate marketing motive; generating more sales and profits.
Maslow's Extended Hierarchy of Needs as it relates to Marketing
Abraham Maslow, who was the chairman of the psychology
department at Brandeis University in the early 1950's,
developed a theory for the hierarchy of human needs. Before his
death in 1970 he revised his theory by extending the hierarchy
to include higher value components.
The bottom of the pyramid starts with our physiological needs:
the need to maintain physical well-being and self-preservation;
as you move up the pyramid the needs become more socio-cultural:
the need to be accepted in society; while at the top of the list
the needs become more abstract and intellectual as they relate
to self-identity and the need to communicate that identity to
others.
Maslow's Extended Hierarchy of Needs
1. Physiological Needs
Water, food, sleep, warmth, health, exercise, sex.
2. Safety & Security Needs
Physical safety, economic security, comfort, peace, freedom
from threats.
3. Social Needs
Peer acceptance, group membership, love, and association with
successful groups.
4. Self-esteem Needs
Association with importance projects, recognition of strength,
intelligence, prestige and status.
5. Self-actualization Needs
Need to take on challenging projects, opportunities for
innovation and creativity, learning at a high level.
6. Cognitive Needs
Need to acquire knowledge and to understand that knowledge.
7. Aesthetic Needs
Need for beauty balance, structure.
As marketers, Maslow provides us with a blueprint for
developing a brand personality that can effectively deliver a
compelling, comprehensible, effective marketing message. Decide
which of Maslow's needs your company satisfies and then
construct a marketing plan that delivers both the personality
and message that speaks to those needs.
We are lucky to live in the age of the Internet, for even the
smallest of companies has the opportunity to communicate its
brand personality and marketing message using the most
effective communication environment ever invented, The Web.
The 5 Elements of Communication
To effectively take advantage of the Web's ability to
communicate, you must understand the five elements of
communication:
1. The Environment: the Web is a sterile environment that needs
to be humanized in order to effectively deliver your brand
personality and marketing message.
2. The Message: the Web is an information-
environment where compelling, informative, memorable content is
paramount.
3. The Messenger: the Web is a one-to-one communication system
compared to traditional broadcast and print communication that
is a one-to-many system.
4. The Audience: the Web is a place where visitors choose to
visit you, do not short change them with second-rate
information, poorly delivered in unimaginative, ascetically
challenged presentations.
5. The Process: the Web's multimedia audio and video
capabilities combined with the penetration of high-speed access
makes for the perfect system to deliver brand personality and
needs related marketing messages that humanize your website,
speak directly to your audience on a one-to-one basis, and
inform, enlighten and entertain your audience in a compelling,
memorable manner.
Conclusion
There has always been an ongoing business battle between those
responsible for technology services and those responsible for
marketing services. The Internet may be a great technological
achievement, and it no doubt can be used to provide extremely
useful technological solutions, but at its core and from its
earliest pre-Web days, it was always a way to connect and
communicate information and ideas, and isn't that the essence
of marketing?
The need for businesses to create awareness (Buzz), to spread
that awareness throughout the marketplace (Viral), and to
involve an audience in the spread of needs fulfillment
(Word-of-Mouth) is achieved by taking advantage of the Web's
multimedia communication capabilities. In short, the Web is a
communication tool that can be used by marketers to speak with
a human voice and human face directly to your attentive publics
on a personal, human, one-to-one basis in order to achieve the
prime business motive: more sales and profits.
About The Author: Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia,
a Thornhill, Ontario based website design firm that specializes
in delivering their North American clients' marketing messages
using the latest audio, video, and interactive Flash
presentation techniques to create compelling, informative and
memorable Web-experiences that enhance brand personality and
increase sales and profits. Visit http://www.mrpwebme
http://www.136words
Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.
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